Previewing AMO’s New Look

We’re very excited to begin rolling out a new design for our homepage and add-on details page to a small number of visitors to addons.mozilla.org very soon. These new designs bring some of our most popular pages in line with the new Mozilla styling and provide a cleaner, simpler look for exploring the thousands of add-ons in our gallery.

Homepage

The homepage design features a new hovercard that hides information when you’re glancing through a grid and don’t need the clutter, but reveals it when you’re interested in learning more about the add-on. Using this new layout, we’re able to surface a wider variety of add-ons. The same rotating banners visible in the Firefox 4 Add-ons Manager are now on the homepage to offer fresh new content every month. And we’ve switched our primary popularity metric from weekly downloads to the average daily users each add-on has had over the last 7 days, rewarding add-ons that people love and keep using instead of those users simply tried out because they were already popular.

We’ve also brought back something AMO hasn’t seen in many years: top-level navigation, making it easy to get to any part of the site from every page. This navigation also helps users understand the different types of add-ons available, and we’ll be adding more educational content soon to these menus and the homepage banners.

Add-on Details

When re-organizing the add-on details page, we looked at each individual item and ranked its importance in the process of learning about and installing an add-on. The most important items are at the top, while things most users aren’t interested in have been hidden at the bottom. We’ve also made some much-needed functionality improvements to this page: simple actions like viewing a privacy policy or reporting abuse now load in a lightbox instead of a separate page, developers now have a prominent link to manage their add-on from its details page, and it’s much easier to find other add-ons you might be interested in from this page.

Over the next few weeks this design will start rolling out to more and more users while we watch your feedback and how this design affects user activity on the site. Please try out the new design and let us know what you think — we hope you like this new design as much as we do.

While you guys are at it, would you mind please putting THEMES back into the mainstream on AMO? There are over 120 themes that authors have worked very very very hard to get compatible with Firefox 4.0 and it’s more than a little depressing that the removal of themes from the main page and the Recommended Addons selection that happened over a year ago now hasn’t been reversed. In fact, there would probably be more themes compatible with Firefox 4.0 if it wasn’t a seemingly uphill battle just to be recognized as a part of the community.

1) The “Developers Comments” and the “Version Information” should be on top of “Reviews” and under “About this Add-on”. (It is sometimes very important as a developer to give the users specific information in case they need help. I think the “Developers Comments” fits best in this case. But with the new look, I doubt that anybody will actually read it before they post a review or write a mail.)

2) The “Developers Comments” and the “Version Information” should always be expanded.

3) The “Average Rating”, “Related Categories” and “Tags” look a little lost at their new position.

This is important to me because I’m testing (trunk) nightlies (if I were on Firefox that would mean “Nightly” nightlies, not “Aurora” nightlies), which means that most of my extensions, although they work with the builds I use, don’t advertise it in their install.rdf or their AMO compatibility data; so the only way I knew to see which (if any) of all my extensions had been updated was to check the “recently updated” extensions every 24 hours or so.

I see a Personas Link, just next to the custom theme. In google chrome, I can use a persona type, and modify the colors of the text, tabs, links, etc… while the persona remains as a background. It’s really nice. Maybe that’s what they’re doing for the next version of Firefox. I cannot tell just by looking at the menu design.

I would like you to work more on SECURITY, and not so much on looks. I’m still mad that McAfee Site Advisor NO LONGER WORKS in Firefox 7. I’ve had my computer HACKED before, and I really rely on that Add-On. Until that’s fixed, I don’t care how Firefox LOOKS, I will be forced to use another browser, where McAfee Site Advisor DOES work!

I like the online translator as a button. I just don’t think it needs to be that large. Same for Facebook, Social Networking buttons. I like them, but just a little smaller. On many sites, just looking at a few of the icons for the social networks is all I need to find the networks. A popup can list all the options, or it can just be a link to a page with all the options. I prefer a popup.

Justin is a Product Manager helping experimental projects reach their potential in Mozilla Labs. He previously worked on the Firefox Marketplace for HTML5 apps and led the Firefox Add-ons team, helping millions of users customize Firefox to make it their own.